The Gazette’s Christmas Fund to help our less fortunate neighbours

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MONTREAL — For me, there are several harbingers of the holiday season in Montreal: Christmas trees glimmering in store displays, strings of brightly coloured lights glowing on residential streets, the first carol on a shopping mall loudspeaker.

There’s another tradition that is important to all of us here at The Gazette: the annual launch of the Christmas Fund. This year, as in the last 47 years, we are soliciting your help in making the holiday season brighter for hundreds of our less fortunate neighbours.

Over the next several weeks, we hope to raise $1 million to distribute to 150 local agencies like Sun Youth, the Salvation Army and the Welcome Hall Mission. Because The Gazette absorbs the entire cost of administering the fund, every penny raised will go toward 8,200 cheques that will end up in the hands of some of the neediest people in the Montreal area.

Between now and the end of the year, we’ll be telling you in print and online about some of the people your contributions will help. They are the young, the old, the ill and the unemployed. And year after year, they tell us how much the money means to them.

That’s because the season that celebrates conspicuous plenty is particularly cruel for those struggling with hunger and despair and chronic want. Here is how one reader described it in a letter to the editor last year.

“Poverty is like having been invited to a glittering party full of beauty, good food, vibrant living and titillating gifts, all arranged in front of you, but being told that these are out of bounds for you and your children,” he wrote.

You can help. You can donate by going to www.christmasfund.com online. You can call us at 514-987-2400 and ask for the Christmas Fund.

The donations from generous Montrealers are already rolling in. We just received a $314 contribution from an art show held in Beaconsfield on Nov. 2, and the Fondation Vartan et Lise Touroussian has contributed $5,000.

We’d like to hear from you. Are you and your friends and colleagues planning an event? Are you a former recipient who is willing to share your story? Please send us an email at citynews@montrealgazette.com to let us know. We’ll keep you apprised of our progress and share stories about some of the novel ways people have been raising funds.

Since 1967, we have raised more than $25 million for needy Montrealers via the Gazette Christmas Fund. I’d like to add another $1 million to the total this year. I hope you will join me in attaining that goal.

Thank you in advance for your generosity.

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